| In the last two decades of the twentieth century, crucial processes of political and economic liberalizations transformed the political landscape in much of the post-colonial world. The reigning theory of modernization which was pegged in the era of political emancipation to national development and authoritarian secular stratecraft came under the various challenges of human rights defending groups and the promoters of cultural nationalism. These groups boldly seek to rewrite the history and the future of political modernity, and in many countries, cultural nationalism took the form of an Islamist political project. Through historical and contemporary analysis of topical events and collective processes in Niger---a country ruled by a secular, democratizing state and consisting of a majoritarily Muslim citizenry---this dissertation seeks to uncover the depths and orientations of secularist and Islamist movements in a post-colonial context. Relying on an understanding of the concept of governmentality as a set of regimes of power which seek to shape the conducts of the governed in ways that are pleasurable to a sovereign ideal, the dissertation argues that Niger's liberal republicans and Islamists constitute, in their very antagonism, a form of divided hegemony which strive to order Nigerien lives and which ultimately create dilemmas largely characteristic of the politics of modernity. The articulation of homogenizing codes to the concept of the modern unitary state and rationalist or theological expert knowledge erect, in a context of great material poverty, images of political modernity which liberal republicans and Islamists strive to invest in their divergent agendas. In this process, they produce the specific cultures of the "civil society" and of the "clerical society,"which lead, the dissertation concludes, to a kind of heterogeneous order irreducible to either the liberal republican sovereign or the Islamist sovereign. |
